The Wall Street Journal invited me to recommend five books on the legacy of war, for its 5 Best column. I wrote about novels by John McGahern, Evie Wyld, Patrick Modiano, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Uzodinma Uweala. Amongst Women By John McGahern (1990) 1. The threat of imminent violence hangs over every page of this Irish…(Read More)
“How do we as individuals reconcile the war experiences of our family members with our own, as combatants or civilians? How deeply and permanently does war permeate society, even far—geographically and temporally—from the front lines? And, ultimately, what can we learn from it?” In a fourth-of-July op-ed for TIME magazine…(Read More)
“By the last day of our stay in the game reserve, I had relaxed enough to leave the girls to their own devices while my husband and I joined an armed ranger on a walking safari, proscribed to kids sixteen or under. They had a good time. Amongst giraffes and whistling thorn trees, my husband…(Read More)
“My adult life before becoming a published novelist was like the questing roots that grow wide and far to suck in the moisture and minerals that make the apple tree’s limbs blossom. The deeper and richer and greater the roots, the stronger the tree, the healthier the flower.” Experience Required: Growing the Roots, an…(Read More)
“Most literary novelists feel relatively confident they can sell copies of their newly published book to their parents, probably to their siblings, maybe (if they haven’t sparred too often over loud music, lawnmowers, or leaf blowers) to their neighbors… But how about beyond the fruited plain? Whose work gets read outside of America?” Finding…(Read More)
“From 1997 to 2007, we lived in the small city of Strasbourg in eastern France… During those ten years, I did several notable things: I, with my husband, brought our two daughters through infancy; I began my debut novel, An Unexpected Guest; and I learned to listen to French pop music.” I created a playlist…(Read More)
“[U]sing foreign words is a slippery slope. Creating a sense of place is one thing, but you don’t want to drive readers crazy with incomprehensible phrases or dialect. You want the language to work for the story and not against it.” Some readers are instantly uncomfortable when they encounter unfamiliar words in a…(Read More)
“It was the image of this tiny but indomitable twosome, neither of whom had contracted AIDS, that stayed with me. Every morning the nine-year-old girl would lead her baby brother to the treacherous coltan mines, where he’d work for hours at a stretch running his small hands through mud, searching for colombo…(Read More)
“I’d use the hours on the train to twist and turn our relationship over in my head, bending and inverting it, hoping to end up with a shape I could understand. I knew that an intelligent, liberated woman like myself was supposed to expect more from a relationship, but I couldn’t stop waxing…(Read More)
“I put off reading my own work to an audience for years. I worked as a non-fiction writer for newspapers and magazines before publishing fiction and, as far as I was concerned, one of the perks was the ability to communicate while remaining invisible.” For author David Abram’s fun series “My First Time…(Read More)
